The United States should focus on long-term structural factors in key foreign steel-exporting countries, such as Japan's "noncompetitive market," to guard against a recurrence of the 1998 steel crisis, the Commerce Department said in a report released Wednesday.
"Apparent coordination among major integrated steel producers allows Japanese producers to charge high prices for their products at home," the report says. "Higher profits on domestic sales can be used to export at low prices and weather downturns in the economy."
The 240-page "Report to the President on Global Steel Trade: Structural Problems and Future Solutions" was compiled on the instructions of the White House.
Focusing on Japan and six other countries, the report is aimed at mapping out a comprehensive strategy to forestall any possible recurrence of the sharp increases in imports of steel in 1998 that many in the U.S. viewed as a crisis.